Enterprises everywhere are looking for opportunities to improve their businesses, and after an especially damaging year of cyberattacks, cybersecurity will be a key focus in 2022. In order to help enterprises move forward, we at Guardicore believe that reflecting on previously leveraged strategies can best help us identify security gaps and opportunities for growth in the new year.
As a segmentation company, we were keen to uncover organizations’ security approaches and segmentation strategies, and the cybersecurity threats they faced, to gain applicable insight into how they can improve those approaches and strategies. With the help of Vanson Bourne, we conducted a global survey of 1,000 IT security decision-makers in September 2021 and found significant room for improvement in enterprises’ segmentation strategies.
To set the scene for the current state of segmentation, almost all organizations (96%) say they are currently using segmentation in their security approach. Of course, we were glad to hear this! Segmentation is not only recognized as a critical driver of a Zero Trust architecture, but 92% of those organizations attest that network segmentation has prevented cyberattacks from doing significant damage or stealing substantial amounts of data.
Despite this, we were surprised to find that the segmentation strategies organizations are currently implementing are limited. Most organizations (75%) are only using segmentation to protect two or fewer of the six mission-critical assets in their network (critical applications, public-facing applications, domain controllers, endpoints, servers, and business-critical assets/data), with 50% only segmenting one of those assets.
In our report, “State of Segmentation: Strong Implementations Reap Great Security Awards,” we dig deeper to detail more security trends from 2021, such as:
- Lack of segmentation implementation amid COVID-19: A total of 43% of respondents say that network segmentation has either not ever occurred in their organization or not occurred in the past two years. This statistic is meaningful, given the significant and sudden global shift to hybrid cloud environments as businesses adapted to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the data, it’s possible that misconceptions around traditional segmentation approaches prevented security leaders from implementing segmentation projects in their new hybrid cloud environments. Fortunately for organizations, modern software-based approaches to segmentation are much easier to implement in these new IT environments and provide greater security benefits like north-west traffic controland process-level details.
- Segmentation stops cyberattacks: The average time required to limit lateral movement and prevent ransomware attacks is 32% lower for organizations with four or more of their mission-critical assets protected, compared with those with fewer than two mission-critical assets protected with segmentation.
Download the full ebook to see how your security approaches compared with other organizations’ approaches in 2021, and how strengthening your segmentation strategies can bringcybersecurity wins in 2022: https://www.guardicore.com/state-of-segmentation-ebook/.
Article Link: Research Shows There’s Room for Improvement in Enterprises’ Segmentation Strategies - Guardicore